Thursday, July 4, 2013

Independence Day links

---"At press time, a coalition representing the nation’s estimated 3 million American Indians had released a statement completely forgiving the United States for its systematic butchery and subsequent confinement of their people, saying that the new Lone Ranger movie 'had made it all worth it.'"

---the title sequence of Juno---an outtake from The Master---"Southland Tales is a story without specific meanings. It's a Rosetta Stone to help me learn the tongue of our age, the language of flipping between dozens of Internet browser tabs and holding five conversations at once, while the earth decays and the government scrambles to scotch-tape a fractured country together. For reasons I can't -- and don't want to -- understand, it helps me cope with the logorrhea of a given day, the unceasing garbled stream of messages from the near-future." --Abraham Riesman
---three reasons: Fish Tankand Wild Strawberries

---“To appreciate Kiss Me Deadly, you have to love movies passionately and to have vivid memories of those evenings when you saw Scarface, Under Capricorn, Blood of a Poet, Less Dames du Bois de Boulougne and The Lady of Shanghai. We have loved films that had only one idea, or twenty, or even fifty. In Aldrich’s films, it is not unusual to encounter a new idea with each shot. In this movie the inventiveness is so rich that we don’t know what to look at–the images are almost too full, too fertile. Watching a film like this is such an intense experience that we want it to last for hours. It is easy to picture its author as a man overflowing with vitality, as much at ease behind the camera as Henry Miller facing a blank page. This is a film of a young director who is not yet worrying about restraint.” --Francois Truffaut---Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film

---"what is necessary is to show the hero at the precise moment where we expect him, with his instinct, judging.

This brings us to Howard Hawks. Apart from a few scenes with harsh lighting, sometimes unbearable, with him, everything is prepared. An important point, rhetoric in exposition, too dry for a brutal resolution. There is a strong anticipation for something to happen, this is evident, and what is really surprising, is how it’s not expected, and this action which one would assume would be difficult, is actually done with an ease. Just like how Hitchcock plays with the fear, the kind of fear that is associated with danger, haunting the audience with suspicions, in a similar vein Howard Hawks’ gaze, how does he transform his subjects? Through an analytic examination and their geometric material. In this physical world where folkloric American heroes live, no missteps are allowed, and for the filmmaker: no bravura, fog or metaphor. I do not know of any filmmaker that is more indifferent to cinematic plastic form, with his banal editing, but on the other hand, more sensible to the gestures of characters, and pacing." --Maurice Scherer

Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws
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March is almost over. And I've lost my claw mojo. I always win this thing. Always. March was was a dreadful month. It'll return. The claw. March, hopefully, ...